Ten months ago, I moved to Boston to attend Emerson College as a creative writing M.F.A. candidate with focused aspirations: I wanted to write and I wanted to teach. I certainly didn’t anticipate jumping head-first into the startup world in my first year here (or ever) – because I didn’t know I could. My undergraduate college transcript reads like something out of Emily Dickinson’s adolescent dreams: British Literature, Creative Writing Workshop, Introduction to Linguistics. Sales and marketing were the things I assumed I would never have to think about, outside trying to be a savvy consumer in my own life.

But after hearing about my struggle to find an engaging, exciting internship for my first summer in Boston, an entrepreneur friend reminded me that I had more options than the literary ones I had stuck to so blindly: writing, after all, is a highly marketable skill, especially in a city like Boston. Luckily – or shall I say, serendipitously – he convinced me to attend RubyRiot.  

Fred Wilson is one of my favorite venture bloggers. Over at AVC, he wrote a post a little while ago entitled What a CEO Does. Speaking on a panel this weekend at Harvard College on careers in finance, I had to describe what I do and realized that people still view VC as something of a "black box." The intent of this post is to give entrepreneurs (and the rest of you) a bit of a peak inside.

This post on "Agile" continues a mini-series on misunderstood terms in technology. Previous terms were the cloud and NoSQL.

One of the hardest things as a startup founder is handling the growth of your company and your ever changing role as that growth occurs. Matt Lauzon is founder of Gemvara, a Boston based, venture backed startup that is at the cutting edge of e-commerce for jewelry. I had the opportunity to have an e-mail interview with him about the lessons he's learned as Gemvara has grown from a startup out of Babson College to a twice venture backed growing venture now with over 30 employees.

Recently, I was sitting at my desk going through the day to day grind of a typical work week, when I realized how much time and energy I was wasting by doing these tedious and mundane (or as my boss puts it, “Essential”) tasks which were apart of my job. I figured, why not tweak it a little bit and see the results?

So you’ve a great product, you’ve spent time and money, working tirelessly to make sure that it’s got all the bells and whistles that you think people will love. But how do you know? Does it really reflect what your customers need or want? Both new and established businesses fall into the same trap, thinking: We have a great product, people are going to love it, and we are going to rake in the dough. The main focus is on product development with minimal contact with customers. But not focusing on customers’ needs and wants can break a business. It’s putting the cart before the horse, and unlike in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Have you ever noticed that girls always seem to travel in groups at night?  Or that smaller guys at the bar always seems to act tougher when “their boys” are around?  Not so much a coincidence.  People are very much a product of their community (or “tribe” as Seth Godin might point out).  In fact this concept of “community” is a very powerful one.  It’s a pretty democratic idea when you think about it.  Community is what empowers petitions and protests to be such powerful tools.  Community is the power of people.

In fact, social media and web 2.0 websites have only made this idea of tribes even more powerful.  Why else would there be well over 40 pages of open “Community Manager” Jobs?  Why would I do what I do at Grasshopper Group and Jason do what he does for oneforty?  Because it works…and businesses need to care about their community now more than ever.  Here are a few reasons why if you don’t have a community manger…you need to hire one:

Last semester, I set out to write my senior thesis for American Studies.  I’d been inspired by a song from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, in which snarky puppets sang about the joys of schadenfreude, or “German for happiness at the misfortune of others.”  Avenue Q’s fuzzy characters honed in on everyday examples of schadenfreude, like “football players getting tackled...CEO’s getting shackled.”  When I heard this song, I came to realize that schadenfreude wasn’t just found in such mundane experiences as seeing someone miss the train, but that it was actually a far more widespread cultural phenomenon and a key component within the realm of social media.

Finding someone to start a venture with you is tough business. Being a newlywed and finding many similarities between this and getting married, I always tend to associate seeking a cofounder with dating. So, I've assembled five tips for you that should help set the mood.

 A few terms in the technology industry are frequently misused and misunderstood:

 - Web 2.0

 - The cloud

 - Agile

 - NoSQL

 - HTML5

I’d like to examine one of those terms, “the cloud”, from the ground, as a web developer who works mostly with Boston startups.